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In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
Matthew Desmond -
I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
Matthew Desmond
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Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.
Matthew Desmond -
Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.
Matthew Desmond -
Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
Matthew Desmond -
When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
Matthew Desmond -
'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
Matthew Desmond -
I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.
Matthew Desmond
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
Matthew Desmond -
Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
Matthew Desmond -
I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That's really always unsettled me.
Matthew Desmond -
Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.
Matthew Desmond -
If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
Matthew Desmond -
Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
Matthew Desmond
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If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
Matthew Desmond -
Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
Matthew Desmond -
I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.
Matthew Desmond -
Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land.
Matthew Desmond -
All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
Matthew Desmond -
Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
Matthew Desmond
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There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day.
Matthew Desmond -
I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
Matthew Desmond -
Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
Matthew Desmond -
When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
Matthew Desmond